This paper demonstrates a new quantitative approach to identify what is behind universally sensed sound symbolism and sound symbolism detected only by speakers of a particular language. We presented 70 locomotion videos to Japanese and English speakers and asked them to create a word that would sound-symbolically match each action, then to rate the action on five semantic dimensions. Multivaria...

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Sound symbolism is a property of certain words which have a direct link between their phonological form and their semantic meaning. In certain instances, sound symbolism can allow non-native speakers to understand the meanings of etymologically unfamiliar foreign words, although the mechanisms driving this are not well understood. We examined whether sound symbolism might be mediated by the sam...

Sound symbolism is the term for a hypothesized systematic relationship between sound and meaning (Hinton, Nichols, & Ohala 1994). The idea that there might be a non-arbitrary relationship between the physical aspect of a speech signal and its meaning is quite an old idea, dating back at least to the time of Plato who, in his work Cratylus, had Socrates debating with two pupils the issue of whet...

Sound symbolism, or the nonarbitrary link between linguistic sound and meaning, has often been discussed in connection with language evolution, where the oral imitation of external events links phonetic forms with their referents (e.g., Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001). In this research, we explore whether sound symbolism may also facilitate synchronic language learning in human infants. Sound sym...

The existence of sound-symbolism (or a non-arbitrary link between form and meaning) is well-attested. However, sound-symbolism has mostly been investigated with nonwords in forced choice tasks, neither of which are representative of natural language. This study uses ideophones, which are naturally occurring sound-symbolic words that depict sensory information, to investigate how sensitive Dutch...

The paper aims at investigating the idea of a symbolic nature of sounds and its implications for in the acquisition of foreign language phonology. Firstly, it will present an overview of universal trends in phonetic symbolism, i.e. non-arbitrary representations of a phoneme by specific semantic criteria. Secondly, the results of a preliminary study on different manifestations of sound symbolism...